Body

KINGSTON, R.I. – July 23, 2009 – News reports last week about scuba divers off San Diego being menaced by large numbers of Humboldt's or jumbo squid have raised the ire of University of Rhode Island biologist Brad Seibel. As a leading expert on the species who has dived with them several times, he calls the reports "alarmist" and says the squid's man-eating reputation is seriously overblown.

For years Seibel has heard stories claiming that Humboldt squid will devour a dog in minutes and could kill or maim unsuspecting divers.

While repair of the central nervous system has long been considered impossible, French researchers from Inserm, the CNRS and the UPMC have just developed a strategy that could promote neuronal regeneration after injury. The in vitro studies have just been published in the journal PLoS ONE.

The progressive degradation of useful soils for agriculture and farm animal husbandry is a growing environmental and social problem, given that it endangers the food safety of an increasing world population. This fact prompted the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development – Neiker-Tecnalia – to design a series of research projects in order to evaluate alternative agricultural practices, as a function of their capacity to combine the productivity of crops with the health of the soil.

The criteria of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)'s Red List are an essential tool for evaluating the conservation status of species around the planet, and according to these criteria all the species in the Canary Islands are endangered. However, research carried out recently by José Luis Martín Esquivel has highlighted some conflicting areas within the scientific protocol designed to identify threatened plants and animals.

A novel drug that targets a master disease-causing gene can dramatically reduce heart muscle damage after a heart attack and may lead to significantly improved patient outcomes, researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have shown.

The drug, known as Dz13, specifically targets and neutralises the master regulator c-Jun gene, which is responsible for inflammation and muscle death in the aftermath of a heart attack, trials in preclinical models have found.

Current treatment of cystic echinococcosis is surgery or percutaneous aspiration, injection and reaspiration (PAIR) using hypertonic saline or ethanol. It is aimed at causing permanent damage to the endocyst - the thin, delicate, and translucid inner membrane that produces the cystic fluid and generates new larval elements able to expand the infestation.

Rice is the world's most important food crop. Understanding its valuable genetic diversity and using it to breed new rice varieties will provide the foundation for improving rice production in the future and securing global food supplies.

Recently published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) are the findings of the research team, which scrutinized the genomes of twenty different types of genetically diverse rice used in international breeding.

The evolution of multiple antibiotic resistances is a global and difficult problem to eradicate. Isabel Gordo, a group leader at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC)- Portugal, reports in the paper published in the latest issue of PLoS Genetics (*), that the deleterious effect associated with the acquisition of resistance by a bacteria can be suppressed by the acquisition of a new resistance to another antibiotic.

US researchers have created 'bacterial computers' with the potential to solve complicated mathematics problems. The findings of the research, published in BioMed Central's open access Journal of Biological Engineering, demonstrate that computing in living cells is feasible, opening the door to a number of applications. The second-generation bacterial computers illustrate the feasibility of extending the approach to other computationally challenging math problems.

Uncooked meat products enhanced with food additives may contain high levels of phosphorous and potassium that are not discernible from inspection of food labels, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN). This can make it difficult for people to limit dietary phosphorous and potassium that at high levels are harmful to kidney disease patients.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a frequent complication for patients in intensive care. A new laboratory test called urine neutrophil gelatinase associated lipocalin (NGAL) helps predict if patients will develop acute kidney injury, reports an upcoming study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). "As a stand-alone marker, urine NGAL performed moderately well in predicting ongoing and subsequent AKI," comments T. Alp Ikizler, MD (Vanderbilt University).

New data collected at Columbia University Medical Center and by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine are helping researchers understand the extent to which a certain protein, NGAL, plays a role in marking chronic kidney disease resulting from HIV. They are also trying to distinguish nephropathy from more common causes such as diabetes and hypertension.

Coal dust exposure is directly linked to severity of emphysema in smokers and nonsmokers alike, according to new research from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

"In this study we have shown that coal mine dust exposure is a significant predictor of emphysema severity," said Eileen Kuempel, Ph.D., a senior scientist at NIOSH and lead author of the study.

"The National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for ozone was recently revised to set lower limits for ozone concentrations. Our research indicates that the threshold for decrements in ozone-induced lung function in healthy young subjects is below this standard," said Edward Schelegle, Ph.D., of the University of California Davis.

Lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS) can have a significantly beneficial effect in patients with severe emphysema, according to a study that randomized emphysema patients to receive either LVRS or non-surgical medical care.